Dirk Kulawiak
Storage Team Lead at Weaviate
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDirk Kulawiak is a Munich-based storage team lead and former physics PhD with 10 years of experience building high-performance, concurrent software across CPU and GPU environments. He combines deep algorithmic thinking and performance engineering with pragmatic API and UX design, having led a major redesign of Weaviate's Python client and accelerated parts of its API by up to 70% through gRPC. Dirk has led cross-functional teams from research to production—creating a parallelized multi-agent simulation for reinforcement learning at Deutsche Bahn—while promoting hands-on mentorship, minimal meetings, and autonomy. He champions well-tested, maintainable code and focuses on practical optimizations in low-level concurrency and hybrid search. Comfortable spanning research and product engineering, Dirk is equally at home profiling bottlenecks as he is enabling teammates to take ownership.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
General qualification for university entrance (Abitur) Advanced courses: Math/Physics, General qualification for university entrance (Abitur) Advanced courses: Math/Physics at TaunusgymnasiumTechnischen Universität DarmstadtPh.D. Physics, Ph.D. Physics at Technische Universität Berlin
German, English
Github Skills (65)
similarity-search10
vector-search10
neural-search10
python10
vector-database10
semantic-search10
mlops10
gpu10
fault-tolerance10
cloud-native10
recommender-system10
grpc10
search-engine10
image-search10
information-retrieval10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
weaviate/weaviate-python-client
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
A python native client for easy interaction with a Weaviate instance.
Contributions:1 release, 933 reviews, 153 commits in 3 months
pythonweaviatevector-search
weaviate/fgprof
Jul 2024 - Sep 2025
🚀 fgprof is a sampling Go profiler that allows you to analyze On-CPU as well as Off-CPU (e.g. I/O) time together.
Contributions:1 release, 5 PRs, 5 pushes in 1 year 1 month
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